External HDD doesn't work with windows, crashes with mac

[raptor402]

Hi

I have a WD My Passport Essential 1TB HDD. It had been working fine until I lent it to my cousin to put on some TV shows. Now it refuses to work with Windows. It shows up in device manager as "disk" but doesn't come under disk management. The weird thing is that when I disconnect it my PC says that I need to format the drive before I can use it. I've tried multiple machines but to no avail.
It seemed to be working fine on my Mac, but when I tried to copy a file from the files my cousin had put in the drive disconnected midway and I had to replug it before the OS recognized it again. I assumed that there was a problem in the stuff my cousin had put on so I moved it all to the trash, but now when I try to empty my trash the drive again disconnects.

One solution would be to, of course, backup all data through a mac and format the drive, but I don't have the drive space required for that. What else can I do?

Any help will be appreciated.

Regards
Raptor

 

[jjsbasmt]

When you say "I lent it to my cousin to put on some TV shows" do you mean he connected it to a DVR of some kind or did he just copy files of TV shows to it from a PC?

 

[bico]

it might be fried, disconnecting isn't normal behaviour regardless of the system. i have usb stick that works fine when connected via usb1 hub and constantly disconnecting when connected to the usb2

 

[raptor402]

When you say "I lent it to my cousin to put on some TV shows" do you mean he connected it to a DVR of some kind or did he just copy files of TV shows to it from a PC?

He copied the files from his PC.

As I said, I moved the files in question to the trash. Now if I try to empty trash with the drive connect it would start compiling the files to be deleted but before it can start actually deleting them the hard disk disconnects. If I don't touch the files in the trash then it works smoothly with Mac, but windows still refuses to recognize it. I don't think it's "fried" per say. Just some of the sectors are corrupt. Can I do anything which will save me from formatting the whole drive?

Regards
Abhinav

 

[jjsbasmt]

I'm a big fan of a program called HD Tune which can be found free on the "Betanews" website. Just search for it on the FileForum section. Use this to try to run a full scan of the drive. DO NOT do the Quick Scan as it will not find any bad sectors. This may take many hours so I would run it overnight or while at work or school. Please post back after the test with results.

 

[raptor402]

Thank you, everyone, for your advice, but I think I might have the problem figured out. Well... not exactly figured out, but I now know that the problem isn't a fault in my drive in particular, it is there in many WD My Passports. I went onto the WD support forums, something I should have done at the very beginning of the issue, and found that many people were experiencing the same issue with the drive. However I couldn't find any proper fix.

The drive stopped working with Mac too. As a last resort to save my data I opened up the drive and removed the hdd itself to connect it to my PC via SATA, hoping that it would work, but turns out that the circuit board doesn't have SATA, but is directly a USB 3.0 board. So I took an old WD 2.5" hdd and removed its circuit board which I then attached to the drive in question. That, however, didn't work. No power to the drive. I'm going to write (type?) to Western Digital and see what they say.

Thanks again
Raptor

 

[bico]

that wouldn't work, firmware needs to know how are tracks laid out on the drive. also, have you tried connecting it via usb1 hub?